Our Trade War Against Ourselves

Treating Canada as an Enemy Leaves us Weaker in Every Way

It’s not difficult to see why Trump would want a trade war with Canada.

He has lost his war with Iran, but the depth of his humiliation of our country has not yet set in. Best to change the subject while possible to a conflict that he thinks he can win by the midterms.

Except that he can’t.

As Trump proves again and again, it is entirely possible to be both morally wrong and geopolitically weak. And his weakness becomes our weakness, his nihilism our national embarrassment, or really tragedy.

In order to carry out trade policy, you would have to have some understand of how markets work, which Trump does not. His basic premise, as I try to explain in the first video, is not just flawed but simply wrong. He does not understand what a trade deficit is. It means that you bought something that you wanted or needed with money.

So you very likely have a trade deficit with a grocery store, or a coffee shop. But when you leave the grocery store you don’t look at the receipt and say that you should get all of your money back and keep the groceries because it is wrong that you should have to pay for anything.

That is Trump’s approach to Canada, our most important trade partner.

And it’s actually much worse than this: applying tariffs means that we are insisting now on paying more for the things that we used to get for less. It’s like going to the grocery store with reverse coupons and insisting that, because you are mad that you have to pay money for things, you will now insist on paying more money for those same things.

At the center of this you see one of Trump’s weaknesses. He has spent his whole life ripping people off. He is therefore unable to imagine an exchange that is not someone being ripped off. He lives in obvious fear that this time it might be him. And so getting him to start a trade war with Canada must be very easy: you just wave some numbers in front of him and explain that a trade deficit means that he personally is getting ripped off.

Trump has had a similar personal experience with politics, which leads to a similar misunderstanding. He has been able to win presidential elections while openly scorning his country and its people. He has no notion of patriotism, no sense that the United States is anything other than a piggybank to be broken. He lacks any concept of sovereignty -- that a polity exists beyond the whims and the greed of the people in charge.

This means that Trump can respect people like Vladimir Putin, who have done what he has done, but more effectively. But he cannot understand people who are patriots, who do care about their own country and people, who see sovereignty as a reality and as a value.

So he will fail to predict, as I discuss in the second video, the actions of Canadian elected officials such as Mark Carney, the federal prime minister, or Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario. He expects them to fold, because that would be the personally easy thing to do, and what he would do himself. But they won’t, because for Canada the situation is existential, and they care about Canada’s existence.

The two men represent two different political parties, and take opposing positions on many issues. But both understand that the American approach to Canada is designed to undermine Canadian sovereignty, and both -- unlike Trump -- care about the future of their own country.

The same holds for Canadians generally. We can hurt them, and they can hurt us; but Americans generally see no point in our aggressive trade policy, whereas Canadians generally do see a point in Canada’s self-defense. (In one poll, more Americans supported the Canadian response than the American aggression.)

When Canada responded to the US tariffs, as it had no choice but to do, Trump’s people had to raise the level of their own delusion by claiming that Canada was too weak to do what it was in fact doing. This argument was supported by a legion of stereotypes meant to show that Canada is not a real country.

Interestingly, one argument that is often used is that Canada does not exist because it has health care. The reality is quite the opposite; a country that can create a national health care system is more aware of its own existence, because of the experience of solidarity which enables everyone to thrive thanks to everyone else. We are less of a country because we are unable to do this.

However senseless it is, American rhetoric of the non-existence of Canada is concerning, because it resembles the way the Kremlin spoke about Ukraine, and rightly reminds Canada that their sovereignty is indeed the issue.

But if Canada responds, as it has, Trump has no next move. If Canada acts as a sovereign state he has no answer. There is no political support at home for his trade policy. It baffles even his own political party. Threats of actual war, though made, are hollow; we are losing one war already, our defense secretary is busily degrading the army and cancelling basic modernization programs — and a country that opposes a trade war with Canada is unlikely to want to invade it. Indeed, huge majorities of Americans still describe Canadians as friends.

The embarrassing decision to start calling Lake Ontario “Lake America” is really an admission of defeat. If we can’t understand the basics of economics and politics, if we must lose a trade war to Canada while we are losing a shooting war to Iran, let us least paste our name somewhere.

Is it even our name, though? In the third video I ponder a bit on what it means to name everything after yourself.

America was the name (almost) of an Italian navigator who wrote attractively about what Europeans called “the new world” in the late fifteenth century. In a bit of a stroke of luck for him, his first name was attached by European mapmakers to the two continents, the Americas, North and South America. Our country was called “The United States of America” in the late eighteenth century because it began on a land mass that had been known as America already for more than two hundred and fifty years. When we start calling further bodies of water “America” we are bringing supererogatory cartographic glory to the name of Amerigo Vespucci.

When we try to name everything after ourselves, we lose a sense of who we are. What is “America” if it is hollowed out as bluster, over and over again? Who are “Americans” if we serve as the brand name of one man’s flailing imperialism?

If we want some kind of self-definition, if we want to get through this self-made catastrophe, the words “United” and “States” are worth remembering, and stressing. They name our constitutional republic.

To have states is to have a form of politics that goes beyond the grasp of a single man. And to be united is to have a larger sense of the history and the future of the people. We lose that dignified sense of purpose when we allow power to remain in the hands of someone who understands neither unity nor statehood, who seeks only to divide us for personal profit, who cares nothing for the continued existence of our country, who senselessly alienates those who have been our loyal friends.